Scholastic book: "Great Horror Movies"

• Title: Great Horror Movies
• Author: Favius Friedman (the copyright page states "F. Louis Friedman"). According to Sim Branaghan's 2018 article "Monsters Maidens and Mayhem: Horror Film History Books 1965-79 (Part 2)" for Film on Paper, Friedman lived from 1900 to 1990. Branaghan notes: "Friedman arrived in Hollywood in 1944 and worked as a prolific Tinseltown journalist for the next 25 years or so. ... By the end of the 60’s Friedman had switched to writing a sequence of young-adult paperbacks for Scholastic Corp, who enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) a vast readership due to their historic monopoly on US grade-school Book Club distribution. Friedman wrote at least six Scholastic titles."
• Cover photo: That's Lon Chaney Jr. in Jack Pierce's chilling makeup for 1941's The Wolf Man.
• Back cover excerpt: "Do you stay up all night to watch horror flicks on the late late show? Are you first in line when reruns of old monster movies come to your neighborhood? If so, this book's for you. Fantastic and fabulous facts and figures about 70 of the world's most famous horror and monster movies."
• Publisher: Scholastic Book Services (TK 2408)
• Cover price: None listed.
• Year: First printing, February 1974
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 160
• Friedman's dedication: "This book is for Maxie, Karie and Im, Cordalie, and Anna Francesca."
• Friedman's acknowledgments: In a passage written in March 1973 and included in the book, Friedman gives credit to Carlos Clarens' An Illustrated History of the Horror Film; Peter Underwood's book Boris Karloff; Focus on the Horror Film, edited by Roy Huss and T.J. Ross; Focus on the Science Fiction Film, edited by William Johnson; Science Fiction in the Cinema by John Baxter; and friends Roger Corman, Julian Myers, and Mildred Simpson.   
• Excerpt from the introduction: "Just how popular the movie King Kong has been over the years can be judged by what happened during a certain week in March 1955. Executives at a top television station in New York, WOR-TV, decided to try an experiment. They would program the 1933 film King Kong — then 22 years old — for seven evenings in a row, or a total of 16 consecutive showings (two a night and three over the weekend). The movie ran every night, all through that week of March 1955. Rival TV station managers are probably still in shock. That ancient horror flick, all but derided as "a silly trick epic" at its initial New York theatre showing, actually had more people watching it on television than sat through Ed Sullivan, Groucho Marx, and Bishop Fulton Sheen!"
• Small correction: Friedman has the other details right, but the year wrong. The 16 showings of King Kong were on WOR-TV from March 5-11, 1956.
• Films included in Great Horror Movies: There are about 70 of them summarized by Friedman! You can guess a lot of the obvious ones: The Birds, Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Haunting, The Innocents, King Kong, etc. There's a big emphasis on science fiction, with War of the Worlds, Planet of the Apes, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Forbidden Planet and Fahrenheit 451, among others. Both Val Lewton's Cat People and Curse of the Cat People (one of my Christmas favorites) are included. Among the most interesting, or outright bizarre, inclusions are Bigger Than Life (1956, with James Mason), Bobbikins (1959), Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), The Ghost Goes West (1935), The Boy with Green Hair (1948), The Mind Benders (1963), The Power (1968), and 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964).
• Rating on Goodreads: 4.0 stars (out of 5)
• Goodreads review excerpt: In 2021, Kirby Davis wrote: "I reread it now to study how my language appreciation has changed (it's interesting to find prose referring to Bette Davis and Vincent Price in the present tense), to count how many of these films I have actually watched over the last half-century, to reflect on how horror films have changed over that time, and to ponder how these films (and my appreciation for them) impacted my character. ... Even though Friedman's tome now covers but the first half of Hollywood's existence, the book provides insightful commentary on the state of the art up to that time and makes good recommendations on what to see."
• Rating on Amazon: 3.6 stars (out of 5)
• Amazon review excerpt: In 2016, Walter Solley wrote: "Friedman writes about this genre with obvious affection and his attitude is infectious. This book leaves you wanting to watch each of these great movies."
• More from Sim Branaghan: In the aforementioned Film on Paper article, Branaghan notes: "The treatment is tersely serious and the historical detail impressive — Friedman is very good at digging out the telling backstage anecdote or box-office snippet. Each film gets a one/two page analysis with cast and credits appended, occasionally followed by a brief overview of themed follow-ups. The oldest film discussed is Caligari (including some shrewd detail on its New York premiere) and the most recent Planet of the Apes. Hammer doesn’t appear (apart from The Nanny), but this is a far from conservative selection with some notably unusual choices."

Speaking of horror movies, check out these related Papergreat posts:

• Spooky cinema: My 53 personal favorites (2024)
• Dark & stormy night Halloween flick picks from Twitter's cool kids (2016)
• Great links: Which movies gave you the biggest fright? (2013) 

Typos and a big spoiler on VHS cover of "Night of the Living Dead"

I behaved over the past year and I've only added one VHS title to my tiny collection that includes Shock and King of the Zombies.

Mostly, I added it because it's hilarious in its audacity.

It's Congress Video Group's 1986 public-domain VHS release of George Romero's 1968 zombie classic Night of the Living Dead. 

Spoilers ahead!

The image on the front cover shows one of the very final moments of the film: Ben (Duane Jones), the main character, is being tossed into a bonfire after being mistaken for a ghoul and shot by a law enforcement posse. It's a grim and powerful moment in a visceral horror movie that eschews a cathartic ending.

Congress Video Group doubles down on the spoiler with this text on the back cover of the VHS box:

"Possibly the greatest low-budget film of all time filled with non-stop action. From the opening sequence, in which Judith O'Dea is terrorized by the first living corpse in the twilight cemetery, to the last slow dissolves and pans of still pictures, depicting the hero's death, the film is filled with ghoulish undertow that pauses only now and then on the thread-line to reality."

Maybe I'm overreacting. But I feel like, especially in 1986, there would have been plenty of potential viewers who didn't know how the film ended. 

Circling back to that (now spoiled) ending for a moment, actor Jones deserves some of the credit for how stark it was.

"I convinced George that the Black community would rather see me dead than saved, after all that had gone on, in a corny and symbolically confusing way," Jones said. "The heroes never die in American movies. The jolt of that, and the double jolt of the hero being Black seemed like a double-barreled whammy." [via SlashFilm, originally from The Wrap]

Jones, meanwhile, is disrespected by this VHS sleeve, which spells his name incorrectly as "Duanne Jones."

Judith O'Dea's name is spelled correctly. But there's another typo when Russell Streiner (Johnny, aka "They're coming to get you, Barbara" guy) is spelled as "Russel Streiner" in multiple places.

Romero receives no credit anywhere in the packaging.

According to the PD Video Wiki, Congress Video Group was founded as Memory Lane Video in 1984. The name change to Congress Video Group occurred in 1985. The company's assets were sold to Allied Film & Video Services in 1988 and Congress ceased operations in 1991. The wiki states that "Congress' tapes were of high quality," though that quality control apparently didn't extend to proofreading the packaging.

The company in its various iterations had a wide range of releases, including The Day of the Triffids, collections of mid-century cartoons, at least one Laurel & Hardy film, Three Stooges cartoons, Forbidden Planet, Little Shop of Horrors, Dementia 13, and something it called Mantis vs. Falcon Claws on the packaging. You can read about its logos at the Audiovisual Identity Database.

Here's Nebula wondering about the VHS.

"Breaking" boulder news from New Hampshire

Yesterday, a 2016 Papergreat post titled "Old postcard: 'The Mysterious Hanging Boulder' in Polar Caves" suddenly zoomed toward the top of the most-read posts.

Alas, that's because, as of yesterday, the hanging boulder is no longer hanging.

An Instagram video by Wildfernandfield first detailed the 80-ton boulder's new position, attained due to the inevitability of time and gravity. It appears that, most fortunately, no one was hurt. That Instagram video (and a subsequent Reddit thread) led a bundle of folks who wanted to see what the boulder looked like before it fell to Papergreat.

Wildfernandfield added in a comment: "We reported it, we were the first customers through the park at opening. In their morning inspection the rock was not like that."

The park is the privately owned Polar Caves Park in Rumney, New Hampshire. 

One commenter on Reddit wrote: "The rock is so obscure. Like there is no entries on Google about this rock besides this Papergreat site and other pages. I swear, most of us is going to learn about this rock only because of this video haha."

And one Papergreat commenter wrote: "Sad I won’t ever get to see it in person."

Well, I'm fairly certain you'll still be able to see it someday, after the park safely reopens (probably in the spring). It'll just be aligned much differently. That boulder isn't getting up and going anywhere. And we still have the old postcards.

Tucson: 2 Little Free Libraries and an air traffic control tower

We visited and added books to two more Little Free Libraries in the Tucson area today, after having also done so last month. The first is shown above and was at a business. The second one was a residential Little Free Library and is shown in the four pictures below. This is the background on its beautiful craftsmanship, per the Little Free Library app: "This library was built by my father, Angelo, in his 89th and 90th year of life. He put his whole heart and effort into it to make sure it was sturdy and would last and be enjoyed for a lifetime! My niece, Jenna, wrote sayings from many different books on the outside of the library. Our wonderful neighbors and friends helped erect the library when it was completed."

You can see Angelo's name in a little plaque on the back. His work, and the work of everyone else who helped to make this library a reality will absolutely stand for years and be a monument to them. We added some very nice books to the already robust collection. 

Finally, here's my shot of Tucson International Airport's old air traffic control tower from this morning. It opened in 1958, was "retired" in 2016 and is now being used for administrative offices. It's not far from another interesting aviation attraction in Tucson: the Boneyard, officially known as the U.S. Air Force's 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group. That's not to be the confused with the Pinal County Air Park, which is a boneyard for commerical aviation north of Tucson.

A well-worn copy of "The Haunted Ghost"

Today's book is a well-worn former library book from more than 50 years ago that appears to be much admired...

• Title: The Haunted Ghost
• Author & illustrator: Barbara Ninde Byfield (1930-1988). This book was part of a series that also included The Haunted Spy, The Haunted Churchbell and The Haunted Tower. None of them seem too easy to come by! Byfield was mentioned briefly in a 2018 Papergreat post about Konkle Memorial Library. A little more about Byfield, plus a photo, can be found at this 2013 post on the Lesser-Known Writers website by Douglas A. Anderson, which is still going strong.
• Publisher: Doubleday & Company
• Year: 1973
• Format: Prebound trade hardcover
• Pages: 36, by my count
• Provenance: Mission Park Elementary School in California's Salinas City School District.
• Excerpt #1: Oswald, full of cheer and gossip, was telling me of how prosperous the town was becoming with new businesses and shops and customers for everything.
• Excerpt #2: "The addition you see being built now must be finished and working in one week or we close the factory," the mayor proclaimed. "They have no business pouring their poisonous waste materials into our lake, and once this purifying system is working they won't have to."
• Excerpt #3: "I think my tussle with the modern world has been as good for me as I was for it," boasted Sir Roger early next summer. "I've lost five pounds, and I even enjoy reading the newspaper from time to time."
• How does a ghost lose five pounds? That's not made clear.
• Rating on Goodreads: 4.38 stars (out of 5)
• Excerpt from 1974 Kirkus review: "Both text and illustrations have more style than the usual picture book about either ghosts or pollution, but we're not sure that Sir Roger (whose experience leaves him 'even more transparent than usual') has enough strength to transport his airy British wit across the Atlantic." 

This wasn't Byfield's most famous book (that would probably be The Glass Harmonica, also published as The Book of the Weird, which may have influenced E. Gary Gygax), but I'm still surprised there aren't more comments about The Haunted Ghost online. If you remember the book, please leave a comment. 

Here are some of Byfield's wonderful interior illustrations...

 

"The Truth About Fake Giants and Other Great Hoaxes" (1981)

When I was traveling to visit my dad in West Virginia last month, I stayed in a hotel in Raleigh, Virginia, on the first night, and after a show about the architecture of the Pantheon ended, the only good thing on TV was Martin Scorsese's 2004 Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator. Though it was late, I ended up watching the whole thing.

The next afternoon, Dad and I went to an awesome bookstore in Beckley, West Virginia, called Burm Booksellers (209 Prince Street). I highly recommend it, if you're ever in the area. They sell books on AbeBooks, too. While there, I was browsing the many shelves full of great old books and I came across this oddball that I'd never heard of: 1981's The Truth About Fake Giants and Other Great Hoaxes, published by Rourke Enterprises of Florida. And, lo and behold, one of the chapters in this book for kids was about Clifford Irving's hoax involving the attempted publication of a Howard Hughes biography. Why you'd have that as a chapter in a kids' book with robots, the Cardiff Giant and winged moon creatures featured on the covers, I have no idea. But it was a heck of Hughes coincidence.

Anyway, the book is amazeballs. It's a hardcover former library book measuring 5⅝ inches by 8⅞ inches. The colorful front and back covers and the interior black-and-white illustrations are by Norman Nodel (1922-2000), a World War II field artist for the U.S. Army who later became known for his illustrations for the Classics Illustrated series.

The author is Timothy Bay, who seems to have a much smaller biographical footprint online than Nodel. If anyone knows anything about him, please share it in the comments.

It's worth noting that this book was first published as Fake Giants and Other Great Hoaxes by EMC in 1980, before being republished in 1981 by Rourke Enterprises with the longer title that adds The Truth About... I have no idea why.

This book spent many years in the Gauley Bridge Library in West Virginia, which was part of the Fayette County Library System before closing in early 2014. The town has a population of less than 600, which may have been part of the reason for that. I do want to note, however, that the Fayette County Library System has an official cat, named Bob. And Bob is no hoax.

The book's table of contents page is pictured below, and I can tell you that, in addition to the Irving-Hughes hoax and the Cardiff Giant, the topics include "King of the Mediums" Daniel Douglas Home [sic], Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast, art forger Hans Van Meegeren [sic], the Piltdown Man, the New York Sun's fantastical moon hoax, and H.L. Mencken's bathtub hoax. It's an odd but fascinating mix.

The book possibly had a fairly limited distribution, because there's very little about it online, especially compared to similar books from the 1970s and early 1980s that focused on similar weird topics, such as the Contemporary Perspectives books. There are no reviews at all on Amazon or Goodreads. I guess this will have to become the post that champions and remembers the book, moving forward. Now is a good time to get a copy, if you're intrigued; I see at least two on eBay with prices under $20.

After the coincidence of The Aviator and The Truth About Fake Giants and Other Great Hoaxes, I was inspired to create a watch list of films that are intertwined in some interesting ways:

• Hell's Angels (1930, director: Howard Hughes)
• Ice Station Zebra (1968, John Sturges)
• F for Fake (1973, Orson Welles)
• The Night That Panicked America (1975 TV movie, Joseph Sargent)
• The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977, TV miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones as Howard Hughes)
• Melvin and Howard (1980, Jonathan Demme)
• It's All True: Based on an Unfinished Film by Orson Welles (1993 documentary by Richard Wilson, Bill Krohn and Myron Meisel)
• The Aviator (2004, Martin Scorsese)
• The Hoax (2006, Lasse Hallström)

It also strikes me that you can draw a direct and fascinating line from Welles' F for Fake to this year's Nathan Fielder/Lance Oppenheim/Elizabeth Holmes film You Can See Everything.

And finally there's Clifford Irving's 1969 book Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory, the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time.

Cozy autumn Postcrossing arrival

This dandy Postcrossing card was sent to me by Ashley in Florida to mark World Postcard Day 2026. Ashley loves books and Halloween, and despises AI. So she's a very good egg. The artwork on the postcard is by Lydia Jean and you can check out all of their autumn-themed drawings and designs at the appropriately named LittleGhostShack.com. Support creators! 

I'll be highlighting more mail in the coming days, alongside the other Mild Fear 2026 posts. We're halfway to Halloween already.

Scholastic book: "Spook"

• Title: Spook
• Author: Jane Little. I can't find much biographical information about her. Her other books included Sneaker Hill and The Philosopher's Stone.
• Illustrator: Suzanne Kesteloo Larsen. I can't find much on her, either. Help would be welcome! For both Little and Kesteloo Larsen, it seems that Spook is their best-known work.
• Back cover excerpt: "Poor Spook! He's the only dog in the world who belongs to a witch! And she'd rather have a cat. No wonder she's so mean to him."
• Publisher: Scholastic Book Services (TX 1001)
• Cover price: 45 cents
• Year: 1965. This is Scholastic's 1967 second printing
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 80
• Little's dedication: "To my family, with love" 
• Excerpt #1: Then abruptly she stopped dead in her tracks, a look of horror settling on her face. Spook craned his neck around the curtain to see what she was staring at. It was a large marmalade cat, strolling down the hall directly toward Grimalda.
• Excerpt #2: When he stopped at last, he was an enormous spider on eight gigantic legs, with two fangs curved like buffalo horns and eight eyes as big as soup plates.
• Is this book kind of creepy? For a kid's book, absolutely.
• Rating on Goodreads: 4.26 stars (out of 5)
• Goodreads review excerpt: In 2018, Kati wrote: "This is such an adorable book! My boyfriend told me it was one of the first *actual books* he ever read, and I love anything even remotely related to Halloween, so I just started reading it one day when I saw it hanging around at home. It’s so sweet. Grimalda is a 'mean, scary' witch without actually being an animal abuser toward little Spook. She’s just butthurt cuz she’s allergic to cats."
• Is that the first appearance of "butthurt" on Papergreat? Yes indeed.
• Rating on Amazon: 4.6 stars (out of 5)
• Amazon review excerpt: In 2011, Sherry wrote: "It is a cute little book, but the reason I only gave it 3 stars is because I do not care for witches."
• Other reviews and memories: A grinchy writeup by Kirkus, a 2017 review on Vintage Toys and Books, and a Facebook post on Vintage Scholastic Books last month featuring a lot of comments.
• And one final view: Writing on the Postcards from La-La Land blog in 2011, NeriSiren, a self-described "Bookwyrm of the Benthic Zone," concludes: "Spook is a very entertaining story, with villains who are goofy enough to offset their scary qualities. Other than a few exposition-heavy passages, the dialogue is believable and the descriptions create vivid, tangible scenes. This would be a fun book for teachers to read to their students the week before Halloween, a chapter or two each day."

Here are some more of the illustrations by Suzanne Kesteloo Larsen:

And here's Mercury posing with Spook. She's always great for this specific season.